In Re Grammar, Roberts's Stance Is Crystal Clear

John G. Roberts Jr. could have easily ignored the letter from E.F.W. Wildermuth that came across his desk in December 1982. The correspondent, an octogenarian lawyer from New York, made an obscure procedural point about the Senate's jurisdiction based on his interpretation of the 17th Amendment; it was not the sort of question that would typically require serious attention from the White House counsel's office, where Mr. Roberts worked at the time.

But rather than dismiss the letter as the work of a curmudgeon, Mr. Roberts seized on it with delight.

Acknowledging that the White House usually ignored such mail, he wrote to his superior, Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, "Anyone who can quote inspiring passages from Plato and Webster, however, and use a word like 'slumgullion,' deserves a reply, and I have drafted one for your signature."

"Slumgullion" being, for the record, a thin stew.

It was a typical remark from a legal scholar who is said to have never lost a local spelling bee as a child and who once wrote an entire White House memorandum in French. In fact, an obsession with rhetorical precision is a central Roberts trait, said friends and former colleagues of the man nominated by President Bush to become a Supreme Court justice.

A cheerfully ruthless copy editor over the years, Judge Roberts has demanded verbal rigor from his colleagues and subordinates, refusing to tolerate the slightest grammatical slip, and boasting an exceptional vocabulary and command of literature himself.

Nowhere are Judge Roberts's tendencies as a grammarian more evident than in his memorandums from the Reagan era, when, as a lawyer in the counsel's office, he frequently peppered notes and documents with minor syntax corrections even when the basic legal arguments were sound. If Judge Roberts is confirmed, and his word-consciousness follows him to the court, it will put him in the upper tier of justices who have put a premium on the English language.

At a minimum, his arrival would add a formidable Scrabble talent to the bench.

Careful wording is "part of his approach to the practice of law," said David G. Leitch, the general counsel to the Ford Motor Company, who overlapped with Mr. Roberts at the law firm Hogan & Hartson and at the Justice Department in the 1990's. Something as minor as punctuation style could cause Mr. Roberts to demand revisions; longer debates "over the way certain sentences were phrased and the possible unintended meaning of certain phraseology" were a hallmark of his style, Mr. Leitch said.

"Judge Roberts always viewed it as a point of pride that we really strived to make everything in our briefs perfect," Mr. Leitch said. "Not that we always achieved it. But he was a stickler for everything, from spacing errors to the formation of quotation marks to grammar, and to the actual construction of arguments. So it was definitely an intense process."

In Judge Roberts's view, he said, "your brief writing conveys not only your argument to the court, but it also conveys a sense of your credibility and the care with which you put together your case."

Yet diligence is a trademark of even Judge Roberts's most mundane memorandums, thousands of which have been made public in recent weeks as he prepares for his confirmation hearings. Time and again in his White House work, he singled out improper usage, though often in a wry tone suggesting a scholar's passion for the English language more than an effort to find fault or boast.

In a memorandum to Mr. Fielding, written in 1983 about a draft document on the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, Mr. Roberts declared, "I have no legal objections, but do have two grammatical ones." Calling for parallelism, Roberts requested that a "him" be changed to "them," and "limit" and "make" to "limiting" and "making."

In a memorandum the next year, responding to a letter from David T. Willard, an elementary school superintendent in Illinois who opposed the administration's education policies, Mr. Roberts again concluded that no legal issues needed to be addressed by the White House counsel. But he took the opportunity to note, "The letter is very sarcastic, although Willard inadvertently proves our point about the quality of public education by incorrectly using 'affect' for 'effect."'

Those sorts of mistakes, common among casual writers, are pointed out repeatedly in his commentary. He suggests swapping the word "voluntarism" for "volunteerism" and offers "ensuring" for "insuring." He corrects the spelling of the country "Namibia" (someone had written "Nambia"); demands consistency in first-, second- and third-person references; and rejects a colleague's attempt to use the word "plurilateral," replacing it with "multilateral."

History is also not beyond repair. In a 1983 memorandum to Mr. Fielding about remarks to be given at a picnic at the Kennedy Space Center, Mr. Roberts corrected the widely remembered quotation uttered by Neil Armstrong upon first landing on the moon.

"It is my recollection," Mr. Roberts wrote, "that he actually said 'one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,' but the 'a' was somewhat garbled in transmission. Without the 'a,' the phrase makes no sense."

David Garrow, a professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta, said: "It has been a consistently striking feature again and again -- in even the very sort of informal memos that it's hard to imagine he ever thought someone would be reading 20 years later -- that there is this very demanding precision, but it's not just grammatical. He is also extremely precise and demanding in his word usage."

Mr. Garrow added, "To my mind, the interesting combination here is that we have this very exacting insistence upon precision coupled with what, for a lawyer, is a remarkable sense of humor."

Where that will rank Judge Roberts in the pantheon of verbally meticulous members of the judiciary remains to be seen. Scholars note that Harry A. Blackmun, the late Supreme Court justice, was a consummate grammarian, and that Justice Antonin Scalia is especially articulate. Among the currently sitting federal judges, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Providence, R.I., is legendary for making vocabulary choices that send even the most educated readers to the dictionary.

Judge Roberts's emphasis on written language came as welcome news even to a Democratic partisan, Theodore C. Sorensen, who served as special counsel and speechwriter to President John F. Kennedy, even if it did not allay his concerns about the opinions Judge Roberts could issue from the bench if confirmed.

"The language ought to be used precisely, particularly by lawyers and judges," Mr. Sorensen said. "This is the best thing I've heard about Judge Roberts so far."

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